Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a single farmstead within a raised earthen ring. Tens of thousands were built across the country between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries, and yet each one occupies a specific patch of ground chosen deliberately, often on a slight rise with good views of the surrounding land.

The townland name Skehavaud offers a small clue to the character of the place. It derives from the Irish "Sceach Bhuí", meaning yellow thornbush or yellow whitethorn, the kind of scrubby, wind-bent vegetation that still marks field boundaries and old enclosures across the west of Ireland. That a rath was established here suggests the ground was considered worth defending or defining, the enclosing bank serving both as a physical barrier against livestock theft and as a marker of status for the farming family within. Mayo has a considerable concentration of such monuments, many of them still visible as low grassy rings in pasture land, their interiors sometimes slightly raised or hollowed depending on centuries of agricultural use around them.